Working With Automated Backups

Amazon RDS creates a storage volume snapshot of your DB instance, backing up the entire DB
instance and not just individual databases. You can set the backup retention period when you
create a DB instance. If you don't set the backup retention period, Amazon RDS uses a default
period retention period of one day. You can modify the backup retention period; valid values
are 0 (for no backup retention) to a maximum of 35 days. Manual snapshot limits (50 per
region) do not apply to automated backups.

Important

An outage will occur if you change the backup retention period from 0 to a non-zero value or from a non-zero value to 0.

All automated backups are deleted and cannot be recovered when you delete a DB instance.
Manual snapshots are not deleted. For information on pricing for storing manual snapshots long-term,
see Amazon RDS Pricing.

In this example, you will enable and then disable backups for an existing DB instance called
mydbinstance.

Disabling Automated Backups

You may want to temporarily disable automated backups in certain situations; for
example, while loading large amounts of data.

Important

We highly discourage disabling automated backups because it disables
point-in-time recovery. If you disable and then re-enable automated backups, you are
only able to restore starting from the time you re-enabled automated
backups.

In these examples, you disable automated backups for a DB instance by setting the backup
retention parameter to 0.

Enabling Automated Backups

If your DB instance doesn't have automated backups enabled, you can enable them at any
time. The same request used to disable automated backups can be used to enable them by
using a positive non-zero value for the backup retention period. When automated backups
are enabled, a backup is immediately created.

All automated backups are deleted and cannot be recovered when you delete a DB
instance. Manual snapshots are not deleted.

In this example, you enable automated backups for a DB instance by setting the backup
retention period parameter for the DB instance to a positive non-zero value (in this case,
3).